NEW YORK TIMES Editorial: …On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced what would be the most sweeping reinvigoration of the clemency power in nearly four decades. This time, the purpose is to deal with the aftermath of the war on drugs, whose casualties are the thousands of people sentenced under harsh and outdated laws…
The new standards — developed with the help of a group of criminal defense and nonprofit lawyers that has been dubbed Clemency Project 2014 — cover any federal inmate who has served at least 10 years of a sentence that would be shorter today because the law has changed. The most obvious example are the roughly 8,000 drug offenders who were sentenced before Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, reducing the punishment for crack cocaine offenses…
The new policy, however, does not address unjustly long sentences issued under laws that haven’t been changed, such as absurdly long mandatory minimum sentences that prosecutors have used to secure disproportionately harsh punishment for many low-level offenders. While Congress appears to be on the verge of reducing many mandatory minimums, the laws — and the inmates sentenced under them — remain in place. Until those laws are reformed, countless more inmates will be sent away for an unjustly long time… (more)
